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Or they are working in a very badly designed system which consistently encourages them to make mistakes

I’m in exactly the same situation. My wife just upgraded from a iPhone 11 Pro to a refurbished iPhone 13 Mini. My daughter just bought a refurbished 13 Mini too.

The second hand market for these phones seems pretty buoyant


The only disadvantage I see might be the increase in use of trade secrets if patents no longer look sufficiently attractive. The quid pro quo basically used to be 'tell us your secret sauce and in return you'll get monopoly use for a period. There's a bit of a balancing act. Of course that original concept has been corrupted

Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied, and if existing patents don't cover it, they can file a patent on the copy, and then you're paying royalties to the ones that copied your tech, etc. We're almost at the point that you can take a video, give it to an AI, and have it produce CAD drawings, circuit schematics, and detailed process documents to rebuild something. We're going to need responsive, flexible, and clear laws around things. The current system is also designed around a court system and process that regularly drags out for 3+ years, and results in lawyers being paid obscene amounts of money. Having a clear claim and no legal technicalities means authors don't have to invest years of their lives and lots of money to fight big companies who don't care about losing a few hundred grand just on principle, and so forth.

A whole lot of the pacing and timing around copyright laws originate with conventions from pre-electricity times, and only get perpetuated because grifty people want their legalized scams to continue.


> Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied

That's true for products that are freely distributed, less so for inventions that are more closely held.

If you're doing something like cutting-edge physics, aerospace, semiconductors, biotech, etc -- trade secrets have always been pretty compelling by default, and patents were seen as a way to encourage more sharing.

It's a balance, and I think we should be mindful that we don't get too caught up in worrying about mass-produced widgets of little importance "taking advantage" of patents so much that we eliminate out the incentive to share the real cutting edge advancements.

In an alternative software world, "Attention is all you need" could have been a trade secret instead of a public paper.


How easy reverse engineering something is varies a lot. Something where the production process is the secret can be almost impossible to reverse engineer, for example.

Stop legally protecting trade secrets then. Why would we have a system that simultaneously grants a limited benefit for sharing information while granting unlimited protection for not sharing? This obviously creates an incentive to only patent things you expect others will soon figure out anyway, which means the patent only harms society.

Make the incentive "if I don't share my information in exchange for a patent, any of my engineers could leave for a competitor and share all of my information tomorrow anyway." You take the offer society gives, or you get nothing.


It's absolutely fine, from what I can tell

My honest take? You're probably right

You are absolutely right.

Here is why you are correct:

- I see what you did there.

- You are always right.


Indeed. 4 strikes and you are out seems fine to me (as a UK driver). You can also opt to take a speed awareness course in leu of the points, I believe

4 strikes today with current speed enforcement is fine; 4 strikes in a hypothetical where 100% of infractions are caught, I aver will catch (almost) everyone who actually drives within a month.

Where I live almost every main road now has average speed cameras, leaving only the small residential streets without, and they are generally short enough that few people are speeding anyway. In general I approve, especially in residential areas, although the surrounding area has gone through a process of downgrading speed limits for no obvious reason, such that it seems their only intent is to annoy drivers so that they want to stop driving. Almost all the country roads in the county I live adjacent to were downgraded from national speed limit to 50mph about 10 years ago. It didn't seem to be anything to do with safety, just seemingly out of spite. I heard rumours that they were also trialing drones to spot offenders (and presumably with sufficiently good cameras to read the plate from up high). Recently, many residential places have dropped from 30mph to 20mph pretty uniformly, again seeming nothing to do with safety as it's entire suburbs (but not all suburbs in the city), even on long straight roads with excellent visibility that would have been safe with limits above the original 30. Doing 20 on these seems completely unnecessary and it's hard to see it as anything other than a revenue generation tactic.

If notice of the infractions is a envelope delivered days later and sitting on on end table for a week, typical drivers are going to rack up 4 strikes before seeing the first one!

Perfect enforcement has to come with immediate feedback


Agreed.

You may be amused/horrified to know that the UK police managed to send me a speeding ticket letter for a car I'd sold 6 months before the offence.

I only owned the car for a week, to sell on behalf of my partner who had moved abroad.


I remember a case from decades ago when someone went from clean license to a ban within 3 miles

I think what he is trying to say though is that people will start to drive slower, especially if they need to drive to function/get to their job.

> This is looking at one variable which isn't very useful.

It’s a core part of the scientific process: “All else being equal…”


It's not though unless they cloned the humans and put them in a lab for 50 years.

That's exactly why you control for other variables

Best compromise is probation make the headline ‘2024 Federal data breach may be…’


Don't worry, Microsoft will eventually name theirs something worse, probably pre-prepended with 'Viva'

... actually, no - they'll just call it Copilot to cause maximum confusion with all the other things called Copilot


Is this the sort of thing you are looking for? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/us/politics/vance-far-rig...


I’ve read the article and I do not see any evidence to the original claim. Where did Vance say that he supports racist ideologies? Being anti-immigration is not racist.


> Being anti-immigration is not racist

it de facto is even if you claim otherwise or hide behind "but economics"

we do not need to give anyone in this administration benefit of doubt.


> it de facto is

So, when Bernie in 2016 said that illegal immigration is bad thing he was racist?


I didn’t say “illegal immigration” I said being “anti-immigration”. Not sure why you’re mentioning Bernie—think that’s more a comment on your politics than mine.

But to be explicit: The current administration’s deportation push is racist. The administration is racist. If you think there’s any other rationale you’re either lying or being duped.


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